"How I Met My Sister"

Out of nowhere, Danielle Pergament got a message from a woman claiming to be her father's illegitimate child. She could have turned away in anger. Instead, she reunited with her long, lost sister, and felt an even deeper love for her dad.

One morning in the fall of 2011, I got to work, turned on my computer, and--not ready to dig in just yet--checked my Facebook messages. High school reunion coming up. Old boyfriend bragging about his new band. And then a name I didn't recognize. Kate Someone. Click.

"Hello, Danielle...

"I'm 51...

"I read an article you wrote about your father..."

Oh, fan mail. That's nice, I thought rather smugly. Then:

"During high school, my mom told me my real father may have been a guy she met on a weekend...

"His name was Henry Pergament."

Pause. Freeze. Reread. There was a woman on Facebook claiming to be my long-lost sister. But that wasn't the craziest part. The craziest part was that I wasn't that surprised.

I should back up.

My father was 61 when I was born. He died in 1998, when he was 85 and I was 24. By anyone's standards, he had lived a fascinating and complicated life: Born into abject poverty in Brooklyn, NY, he spent his childhood in an orphanage. He had no family and no education, yet by the time he was 50, he had made millions by starting several photo-finishing companies. This was the story of my father, a story I told everyone--myself included. But in truth, his story was more than a bunch of quasi-Dickensian bullet points. It was a whole lot messier.

The first person to abandon my father, when he was only 18 months old, was his mother. It hardly takes a Ph.D. in psychology to understand that he would spend the rest of his life seeking out the kind of love he never got from the one woman who was supposed to give it to him unconditionally. He fathered seven children by three women: his first wife; his girlfriend between marriages; and my mom, with whom he had me and my three sisters.

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When my dad was alive, basic math told me I wouldn't have him around for long, and obsessing about his death became a grim pastime for me. Somehow I thought that by reminding myself he wouldn't live to walk me down the aisle, meet my children, and really get to know me as a grown woman, I would be better equipped to handle adulthood without him. Ironically, I spent most of his life--during which he was in excellent health--silently planning for his death.

So when we lost him, I was prepared for it--in my own juvenile way. In the hospital, at the funeral, when we scattered his ashes in our garden, there was a small child inside me insisting, "See?! See?!" at the top of her lungs. I was too busy feeling vindicated to feel grief.

But I never stopped talking about him. In fact, I spoke about Henry Pergament, the myth, a lot more posthumously than I ever did when he was alive. Maybe I was trying to figure him out, maybe I was trying to grieve. I really don't know. But I worked him into conversation as often as I could. I even wrote about him. About seven years after he died, I published an article about how he had cheated on my mother when I was in high school (though they never divorced). The article was cathartic, honest, but again, not the whole picture, not even close. It was a simplistic view of a complicated man. I had gotten very good at judging my father, and not very good, still, at grieving him.

Then, 12 years after his death, there I was: staring at my computer screen with a message from a woman who may be my sister. And just as my head stopped spinning:

"I have an exceptionally rare bone tumor," she wrote. "It is genetic and New York-Presbyterian Hospital is doing a study on me and the disease, which is why I looked him up and found you... Please feel free to not respond," she wrote at the end of her message, "and assume I am crazy."

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So there it was: I might have a new sister. She may be dying of an exceptionally rare tumor. And my life may or may not be a Lifetime Original Movie starring Sela Ward.

I called my husband, who was naturally shocked; he asked a lot of unanswerable questions. I needed to get off the phone with him. I needed my family. I got my oldest sister on the phone. She was dubious, and had to hang up because it was time for her daughter's tennis lesson. I told my other sister; she laughed and said, "You so knew this day was coming." I told my third sister, and we tried to sort out the math (Kate predated both of my father's marriages). I called my half sister who lives in Los Angeles--voicemail. Not really the kind of thing you can leave on voicemail. Finally, I told my mother. She was the least thrown of all of us, and wanted to lay eyes on this long-lost relative.

I decided that if Kate was right, if we had the same father, this connection was a gift. I was curious, of course, but more than anything I felt a responsibility--I felt like I owed it to my father to meet her, to get to know her. I am not religious, but it felt like my father was coming back to me, by proxy: Here was an opportunity to know him better. Did I want to meet? Hell, yes.

David A Land

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I emailed back with my cell phone number, my address, my email, and any other means of communication I could think of. It took 10 days, but finally she called. Yes, she was doing okay, health-wise. Yes, she too lived in New York City. And yes, she would love to get together.

We arranged to meet at a coffee shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I arrived early, and killed time by having a cup of coffee (bad idea) and then another (really bad idea). I had no idea what she looked like, so every time a 50-something woman walked in, I found myself awkwardly tilting my head and raising my eyebrows. Are you my sister? What about you? Then I saw her: tall, dressed in a sharp suit, with red hair and my father's warm, wrinkly eyes. She looked more like him than any of his other seven children--it was like seeing my father in a wig. Not only was this woman not crazy, she was absolutely related to me.

"I'm Kate," she said. We shook hands, she sat down, and we launched into maybe the strangest hour of my life.

Kate, too, had grown up in a family of women. She told me about meeting my father very briefly once when she was 22. She went to his store to put a face to the name--and he was polite but hurried. "I worked at Oppenheimer," she told me. "I think he thought I was trying to sell him something, and he wasn't interested." Kate left my father that day never having told him that she was his daughter. He died not knowing about this child of his. The thought made me incredibly sad for him.

"Where do you live?" I asked her.

Kate and her husband had an apartment on East 65th Street. They had lived there for nearly two decades. A few years earlier, I'd lived on 61st Street. For five years, she and I lived four blocks away from each other. And it took Mark Zuckerberg to introduce us.

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You know what I had never stopped to consider in this impossible narrative? How much Kate would remind me of my father. Her thin lips and square jaw, her broad shoulders--they were all his. But it was more than that: This woman who had met my father only once, very briefly 25 years ago, had his mannerisms. She spoke like him, she gestured like him. She pushed her knife and fork to the side like he did. The way she leaned back in her chair when she was listening intently, her sarcasm, her husky laugh, her generosity, apparent even after 10 minutes (Kate immediately invited my family to spend a weekend with her at her beach house). All of it was him. The uncanny similarity would have been wonderful if it hadn't been so painful. It was like drinking coffee with the ghost of a man who I want so desperately to know--and realizing more than ever that I never will. As I stood up to leave, I realized that the hole my father's death left in me is unfillable.

Now, whenever I see Kate--we have dinner every few weeks--I'm reminded of how much I miss my father. More than anything, it makes me wish that I could reach out to him, wherever he is now, and tell him what a privilege it is to be able to tell Kate about him. That it's a gift to be able to sit for hours and describe the way he loved Mozart violin concertos and vodka tonics to someone who is dying to hear everything. Maybe I can help her piece together who her father was. And maybe drawing his portrait for her will help me remember my father better, so I can tell my own children about him someday. I don't know how long all this grieving and catharsis will take, but I'm in it now, for good. Fourteen years after his death, that process is finally underway. I may miss him more than ever, but I also feel stronger--more connected to him--than ever too.

Meanwhile, Kate's cancer is in remission. Though she still battles with her health and occasional bouts of pneumonia, she seems energetic and on the road to recovery. She has spent time with my mother and has met my other sisters. When I introduced her to my daughter, Kate plied her with pink, sparkly things. She worked her way into my child's heart as easily as she did mine.

That said, there is no precedent for this kind of relationship. Even in my fractured, confused family, this bond seems especially complicated. For now, I'm telling myself that there is no wrong answer. I'm taking small, cautious steps toward a very promising friendship--a friendship with an older woman who is kind and generous and has my father's eyes.

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